Reading Festival and its architecture of adolescence
Alex Hoban tracks the evolution of a festival where youthfulness is a renewable resource, not a demographic
Reading Festival has always been a rite of passage for British teenagers, which is to say, a place where young people are given a space to calibrate how little sleep, poor diet and questionable personal hygiene they can sustain over a long weekend without enduring permanent medical consequences. So why am I, a middle-aged man way outside the target demographic, getting crushed in a cattle gate to reach the front of the Bring Me The Horizon mosh pit?
Well, because I love music festivals beyond sense or reason. This year, 25 years after my first Reading, Berkshire’s cauldron of youth called out to me, saying age discrimination is whack and I should lean in once again. Despite its lack of clear iconography or even a consistent organising principle, I found myself wondering how this shapeshifting annual gathering I grew up with has managed to etch itself into the memory of every generation who’s ever attended, and still somehow hold its place near the top of Britain’s festival pecking order (and the iPlayer). I learned that what Reading understands better than any other festival is that adolescence isn’t a demographic; it’s a renewable resource.
While Glastonbury, the UK’s other great festival institution, feels eternally rooted in traditions as old and unchanging as the midsummer solstice it falls around, Reading, by contrast, is suburban to its bones. A flat pack festival of fields, fences, stages and screens, it’s been built, rebuilt, and redecorated so many times that no one parcel of land remembers what came before. And yet it endures, with a comprehensible rhythm of a consistent pulse: the modest but unshakable dreams of teenagers, renewed and refracted every summer.
Looked at closely, Reading festival’s architecture is less a convenient scenic backdrop than an industrial processing plant for adolescence, endlessly collapsing and reforming its spatial and technological makeup every few years so that each new wave of teenagers are left convinced they are the first to discover this particular mixture of freedom, noise and excess.
Reading’s first iteration came in 1971 as the “National Jazz and Blues Festival,” but it wasn’t until the ’90s that it evolved into the rock festival on which it built its reputation, with peak headline sets from the decade including Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Iggy Pop, Beastie Boys and, in 1992, what would be Nirvana’s final ever performance in the UK. In 1999 it was joined by a sister festival in Leeds, with the same line up, scaling the experience across the whole of the UK before media infrastructure allowed it.
Along the way it’s dabbled with different arenas, layouts and identities, sometimes chucking entire stages at passing fads – The Lock Up once existed for punk and hardcore fans; the NME stage was basically a huge tarpaulin for indie landfill; various comedy tents, film screenings and other experiments have come and gone. This year’s “Aux” stage, a place for live podcast recordings, is the latest offering least likely to survive the next trend cycle. These shifts, rarely dramatic and occasionally erratic, never erase Reading’s identity, they just reaffirm its restlessness, like the suburban teenagers it attracts. It doesn’t endure through grandeur but through sheer adaptability, thriving in places where almost nothing else would bother to grow.
The festival takes place in a deceptively banal environment that does not automatically challenge the senses or suggest its influence. Here we are on working farmland amongst industrial parks forty five minutes outside London, whose grey faceless buildings peak out over the perimeter of the grounds. The walk from Reading station to the festival is a wonderful non-space: car lots, retail outlets and linear housing along noisy A-roads. There’s no magical threshold or transition into the festival universe once you reach your destination, just a pick up/drop off point for mums and dads giving rides from all across the home counties. The anticipatory energy amongst arriving festivalgoers is more attuned to the Shopping Mall Food Court on a Saturday afternoon than the Healing Fields at Sunrise.
When Reading Festival hoovered me up as a spotty 15-year-old in the year 2000, nu-metal ruled and dance music was almost taboo. Slipknot, Deftones and Limp Bizkit were all on the bill (25 years later, somewhat vindicating my teenage tastes, Limp Bizkit were still performing, and drew one of the weekend’s biggest crowds). Shock, awe and excitement were the emotions imprinted on my impressionable young nervous system when I felt the organised chaos of my first mosh pit during Rage Against The Machine, and watched Daphne and Celeste, the girly pop duo ironically cast as a kind of pre-internet ragebait, brutally bottled offstage in an act of festival-sanctioned cruelty.
The frenzied atmosphere went well beyond the music, as kids sought to metabolise unstable hormonal flux into formative life experiences. Giant bonfires erupted wherever space could be cleared inside the arena, usually built from discarded beer cups and torn t-shirts. I remember a kid with a giant spliff taking a performatively long drag before sticking his foot in the fire until his boot set aflame. If he’d only waited for someone to invent the smartphone, he could have become Reading Final Boss.
A year later, in 2001, Greg Puciato, frontman of The Dillinger Escape Plan, proudly defecated during their lunchtime performance, before throwing his excrement into the crowd (to their dignified credit, the crowd threw it straight back). It was an era of reckless abandon for everyone involved, bands and fans alike.
Back at home, adolescents were negotiating new forms of digital exposure as their parents got home computers and dial-up internet. While Napster and Limewire would slowly break down genre silos and eventually pave the way to people having broader music tastes, the arrival of online pornography also started to seep into mainstream culture.
Reading reflected it crudely in its architecture once the relay video screens arrived at the main stage. Cameramen would pan across the crowd between sets, lingering on women who were rewarded or heckled depending on their willingness to expose their breasts. It was the festival as live-action soft porn, a crude extension of the objectifying voyeurism shaping teenage life offsite. Outrageous behaviour, misogyny, mischief, foolhardy antics – none of it seen as warning signs or cries for help. They were badges of honour, proof you were properly alive and taking part in the great sweaty carnival of youth.
The chaos wasn’t unique to Reading. Across the Atlantic, Woodstock ’99 had already collapsed into a bonfire of male aggression and corporate disillusionment (immortalised in duelling Netflix and HBO docs). The UK never quite hit those depths, though Leeds 2002 gave it a fair go: riots, burning toilets, police helicopters, and enough damage to force a site move the following year. Probably for the best it wasn’t livestreamed.
Although highlights packages had been broadcast by the BBC since the early ’80s, it was only in the mid-2000s that Reading became a regular televised event, complete with nightly broadcasts and red-button catch-up, giving the whole country an unprecedented new way to participate in the festival. With the increased focus on the dual audience, and viewers at home now increasingly accounted for, the experience on the ground evolved too. It was time for the festival to clean up its act. First item on the agenda – banning bonfires inside the festival arena, and no more shitting on stage.
While most people’s final Reading happens before they’ve graduated from university, I somehow kept coming back long after, first as a fan and then, by quirk of luck, as a journalist. My friends grew up, got jobs and retired their two-man tents; I just swapped mine for a press pass. Instead of lugging crates of lukewarm lager through the mud, I was being ferried around on golf carts and ushered through checkpoints, catching glimpses of the festival’s inner workings, the subtle negotiations between production teams, artists teams, security teams, press teams – the government that kept the city running.
This was also when Web 2.0 turned journalists into early influencers. We weren’t just writing about the festival; we were liveblogging it, tweeting it, and occasionally blundering into the story ourselves, like in 2008 when I somehow found myself on stage during a Foals set. Testing how far my wristband could get me, I rocked up onstage beside the drummer for the whole gig, looking out at the sea of faces in the crowd, waiting for a security tackle that never came. I was fuelled less by bravado than a misplaced sense of ethnographic duty.
After a five-year hiatus, I came back in 2017 and found the festival looking its age. Digital change and demographic shifts had caught the festival off guard, with its identity in flux. I’d come back to see At The Drive-In and Korn, two classic Reading Festival bands, but their sets were so thinly attended it must have been a wake-up call for the bookers – the next gen were more interested in dance and hip-hop acts on the bill like Major Lazer and Migos.
Things were palpably different from the Reading that raised me. Oversized external battery packs had replaced smuggled in hip flasks as the campsite essential and the biggest queue of the weekend was for entry to a giant mirrored cube that housed a Samsung branded immersive selfie experience. It captured the spirit of the weekend better than any headliner could: the line between being and broadcasting had vanished; the digitisation of live experience was already part of the show.
Reading, ever eager to keep up with its offspring, didn’t always manage the transition gracefully. Post-pandemic, when we were all still overdosed on online living, festival organisers tried to manifest scroll-culture IRL by experimenting with two main stages and back-to-back sets at opposite ends of the field. Fans complained they were trapped in a real-life engagement loop, sprinting between the two poles, while general discovery (and the overall total number of bands playing) dwindled. After a couple of goes at trying to make it work the format was, mercifully, scrapped.
Fast-forward to 2025 and at my big age, I arrived with an open mind. I’d come back not to relive the past, but to see what had replaced it. I thought of Reyner Banham, the ’70s architecture critic who described Los Angeles as a city built on the dreams of its inhabitants, with its freeways and shopping strips shaping how people moved and identified. For me as a teenager, Reading Festival was my Los Angeles, the closest thing the Home Counties had to a city of dreams. Then as now, it functioned as a mini-metropolis, reflecting the needs and values of its perma-youthful citizens.
As I took in my surroundings, I remembered Banham’s warning: don’t analyse new spaces through the rear-view mirror of old assumptions. Today’s crowd aren’t the reckless avatars of chaos we were in 2000, and they certainly aren’t looking back. They’re a digital-first cohort, living through Snapchats and selfies, shaped by algorithms, lockdowns, and the language of informed consent. The rear-view mirror has been swapped for a rear-view camera, always on, always aware. The campsites, once a vast indistinguishable sea of chaos, today reflects an era of individual need, accessibility and safety. There is a quiet camp for people who just want to sleep, offering yoga and meditation in the mornings. There’s the solo camp for people coming on their own and in twos that might be overwhelmed by the chaos and need a more controlled space to meet and socialise with other people. Oh and out the back, there’s still a sizable chunk of land dedicated to your garden variety teenager looking to go bananas in a field without their parents watching. The evolution is managerial: teenage chaos reimagined through the logic of suburban zonal planning and choice architecture.
Inside the arena, at first glance the festival is running to its traditional format – multiple stages running more or less to their own schedule, capturing different subsections of music culture, with stage sizes scaled to accommodate bands at different points in their career. But if Reading in the 2000s was a scrappy little hamlet, 25 years later it’s closer to a modern city. Order, safety and efficiency, with an undercurrent of inequality and being watched over in ways you only notice when you start to look. The main stage is now divided into six fenced-off zones, with broad boulevards for crowd control and quick exits if enthusiasm turns to heatstroke. On iPlayer, an aerial shot of Chappell Roan’s audience appears less like a festival crowd and more like a well-planned suburb from the 1960s. Even the call-and-response arms of ‘Hot To Go’ suggested a well-drilled traffic system for directing personal space.
To get near the front these days you don’t push or wriggle forward from 500 meters back until you can no longer take the resistance, you arrive prepared to queue politely from the sides of your chosen sector, get funnelled through cattle fences, and emerge into a neat little holding pen like an especially enthusiastic cow. It kills some of the spontaneity, sure, but in return you get prime real estate without having to waste an entire day guarding your spot. With only the mildest dedication to get there, I watched Bring Me the Horizon from the front pen, close enough to count singer Oli Sykes’ pores, yet with enough elbow room that I didn’t feel remotely at the mercy of the mosh pit, even though it was thrashing away obligingly just a few feet in front of me.
With so much jeopardy removed, the acts on stage are now more polished for broadcast than primed for bacchanalia. Few understand this new terrain better than Bring Me The Horizon, a band that has spent their entire career mutating and experimenting. Their Saturday night headline show was a masterclass in modern showmanship, fusing metal, cinema and digital theatre into one seamless, slightly alarming whole.
I also saw a glimpse of the new normal for hybrid audience experiences. Midway through ‘Amen’, a song about joining a demonic cult, Sykes stood centre-stage as a bank of cameras tracked his movement. An AI system trained on his live image began generating a real-time digital double on the giant relay screen, twisting, glitching and re-forming him into an undead version of himself. We all watched in awe as the machine hallucinated his zombified alter-ego into existence, frame by frame, right before a killer heavy metal drop.
Remarkable as it was, by the time Generation Alpha finish their GCSEs, this sort of thing will probably be as routine as pyrotechnics. But standing here in 2025, watching a singer morph into a sentient hallucination before tens of thousands of people, I couldn’t help feeling we’d just seen the next blueprint for what live performance, and maybe Reading Festival itself, will become. I’ve always personally held that, above anything else, it’s technology that organises human’s core sense of self and society. Freud was famously skeptical of the invention of radio, for its potential to influence mass psychology and its potential use for propaganda. In some cases (hello, Soviet Union!) this turned out to be prescient and true – but, equally, with no radio, there’d also be no BBC 6 Music. Every tech advancement fundamentally changes the way we relate to each other, by rearranging the fabric of our lived experience.
After the AI-enhanced spectacle of Bring Me The Horizon’s set, stepping into the Chevron tent felt proof that technology isn’t just shaping what happens on stage, but the stages themselves. Punching above its weight as an ‘immersive media space’, what back in the day would have been the ‘second stage’ is now a vast, steel-skinned hangar of light and sound, its ceiling a pulsating LED canopy that runs the full length of the arena. In the same immersive spirit as London clubs Printworks and Drumsheds, it’s a mesmerising digital cathedral built for worshipping basslines. For long stretches of the weekend, it feels like a separate festival entirely; more Creamfields than Reading, with its own ecosystem, its own rhythm, its own devotees who could easily spend all three days inside without ever seeing daylight.
It’s progress, certainly, but progress and equality are rarely the same thing. All that dazzling spectacle has a gravitational pull, and with the main stage and Chevron tent being so distinctly programmed to be almost completely siloed from one another, there’s a sense of audiences choosing their lanes early on then sticking with them.
As a result of this atomisation the smaller stages, once Reading’s beating heart of discovery, now feel pushed further to the periphery. Watching Glaswegian acid punks Vlure go full hootenanny on the Festival Republic stage was one of those moments that reminded me what Reading once did best: the shock of the new, the thrill of stumbling across a band that might just change your life. Yet even as they played their hearts out, it was hard not to sense the fragility of it all. The crowd was not huge. When a Vlure street-teamer (remember them?) stuffed a handful of stickers promoting their new album into my tote bag I felt a rush of nostalgia for simpler times, but it felt a bit like trying to use an 18th century musket to fend off a fast approaching drone strike.
The Festival Republic stage’s struggle for attention echoes the plight of grassroots venues across Britain – tiny, vital rooms fighting to survive while headliners dominate. Reading has become a perfect mirror of the broader ecosystem: as the giants rise higher and dazzle us further, the undergrowth thins, and the middle ground erodes faster than anyone quite realises.
Perhaps jeopardy, that unpredictable, combustible energy that once defined the place, was always the bridge between the two. Without it, discovery becomes something to be curated rather than stumbled upon. So it’s both funny and slightly ironic that the loudest call for rebellion came not from a band, but from a brand. In a tucked-away corner, Jägermeister Platz promised a taste of Berlin nightlife with their own stage and programming and a clear mission: to ‘Save The Night’.
Taking over from where Red Bull Music Academy left off when it was retired shortly before the pandemic, Jägermeister’s Save The Night platform has been supporting grassroots music culture by uplifting talent, hosting music events around the world, and actively investing cold hard euros into innovative, challenging and exciting new expressions of youth culture. At a festival where chaos has been systematically designed out, it was almost touching to hear a liquor company plead for spontaneity and danger, even though the campers in the Quiet Fields, earplugs in and eye masks on, might have said the night was already saved.
And yet, for all its contradictions, Reading still hums with promise. I used to come here to lose myself; now I come to see what’s been found in my absence. The kids queuing for the selfie domes today will be the ones reinventing them tomorrow. As social media finally hits its enshittified saturation point and audiences tire of algorithmic slop, there’s a growing hunger for real, shared, felt experiences. When that inevitable offline movement comes, and it will, Reading will be ready like it always has been. Because the architecture may change – the stages, the screens, even the crowds – but the blueprint remains: a temporary city built on the thrill of being young and alive, still under construction after fifty-odd years.